#Botcon 2016 Japanese G1 Continuity Talk with Hayato Sakamoto

I probably should have mentioned that some of what I wrote reads a little better after having first viewed Sakamoto's BotCon panel. So I'd recommend watching that video of the panel I linked to above before reading the full conversation that Sakamoto and I had after it.

Or, since I also took notes covering what was said at that panel, I could post my panel notes if ya'll would like.

Sakamoto is a cool dude that was a good read about lore.


Would be cool to meet him.

I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another. It's...odd but if you can make it work in your own head well... More power to ya

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Sabrblade wrote:

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Didn't the legends comic connect both animated and g1 as seperate universes which can interact with one another though? Meaning that g1 ultra Magnus did meet animated slipstream.

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Didn't the legends comic connect both animated and g1 as seperate universes which can interact with one another though? Meaning that g1 ultra Magnus did meet animated slipstream.

They met in the Legends Universe after both had come to it from their own respective separate universes.

That was something mentioned at the panel. The Legends Universe is itself a unique separate universe that introduces all aspects of other universes, with characters from such universes as Cloud World, Japanese G1, Animated, and Armada hopping over into it from their own universes. Ultra Magnus came over from JG1 around the late 2030s (after G2), and Slipstream came over from Animated likely at some undisclosed point after season 3.

Sabrblade wrote:

william-james88 wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Didn't the legends comic connect both animated and g1 as seperate universes which can interact with one another though? Meaning that g1 ultra Magnus did meet animated slipstream.

They met in the Legends Universe after both had come to it from their own respective separate universes.

That was something mentioned at the panel. The Legends Universe is itself a unique separate universe that introduces all aspects of other universes, with characters from such universes as Cloud World, Japanese G1, Animated, and Armada hopping over into it from their own universes. Ultra Magnus came over from JG1 around the late 2030s (after G2), and Slipstream came over from Animated likely at some undisclosed point after season 3.

Soo... Axiom Nexus

Sabrblade wrote:

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Th y did connect animated and the movies together. Remember how animated if suppose to the same timeline and continuity as the movie. Japan you so silly

Flashwave wrote:Soo... Axiom Nexus

Sorta, but instead of a whole planet-wide city populated by billions of bots from many universes, it's a universe inhabited primarily by Chibi versions of Beast Era characters with real world mundane jobs and careers, and only a small handful of bots from other universes who are treated as celebrities in the Legends Universe since the Transformers toy and media brand itself also exists in that universe.

Randomhero wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:

Randomhero wrote:I heard about his panel on another site. I heard he and a lot of fans from Japan consider everything to be part of the original G1 continuity in one way or another.

Not everything. No Unicron Trilogy, Movie, Animated, or Prime stuff, for instance.

Th y did connect animated and the movies together. Remember how animated if suppose to the same timeline and continuity as the movie. Japan you so silly

That was their original plan, but they ultimately didn't do it.

Great Interview,
thank you for sharing.

Awesome! I'd love to meet Sakamoto, he seems like a pretty awesome dude (and he's a superb artist to boot).

I've decided to go ahead and post my notes from the panel anyway, along with the video recording I linked to earlier. Here y'are:

Hayato Sakamoto’s Transformathematics panel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XGENt3QwZw


Hayato Sakamoto, Andrew Hall, Ken Rose

More Than Meets the Eye

Issue 50 cover –exclusive cover by Hayato Sakamoto and Casey Coller

Sunder
Sakamoto was first told by James Roberts to make a Freddy Krueger type character, so the claws on his hands are probably inspired by Freddy. Sort of like a nightmare villain like Freddy, sort of ghastly like that.
He tried to go with the Freddy Krueger image, but also knew that Sunder was a scientist, so he might be skinny. But, as the story goes on, he would be attacking and hurting a lot of people. So, Sakamoto decided on a little more of a horror image in his piece.
In the Japanese horror movie Yatsukhaka Mura, a serial killer goes around killing people with two flashlights attached to his head. So, Sakamoto thought that the idea of a serial killer looking a little bit weird might actually be even scarier, so that was his inspiration for the character.
When Sakamoto first showed Andrew Hall the draft, Andrew was against it for it looking too goofy, but Sakamoto insisted that he would make it scary.
In MTMTE issue 48, James Roberts has this image of a very scary face, and Sakamoto started his design for Sunder from that face, which led to the idea of inspiration from Yatsuhaka Mura, and with that inspiration, Sakamoto had reservations from James Roberts for Sunder to transform into a lunar vehicle, and so the altmode of the design needed an antenna. Sakamoto initially had trouble putting the antenna into the design because it kinda speaks too much for itself, but took inspiration from the Taiyō no Tō statue in Japan, which inspired him to make the antenna itself a face.

Kindle and Fervor
New characters, initial and final designs
In Sakamoto’s designs, Kindle was yellow and Fervor was red, but the colorist made some decisions on their own and made them different, apparently. Sakamoto still likes his designs better (LOL), but he does feel the colorist made the right decision.
A lot of effort was put into these designs, but it was pretty easy to tell from the script that these two would not make it through the next issue. So he tried to make them as memorable as he could in their single panel appearance in issue 48. And they did end up dying with just the single panel.

The spy in the DJD, Agent 113
This was another character that only had a single panel in the actual issue, but Sakamoto had some memory that Megatron had said inside of a story that this was a character that can’t hold a gun, so Sakamoto thought about long fingers or lightsaber hands, and also added some attributes that would look like a member of the DJD.
James Roberts instructed that he should have machetes or blades on his hands, which might also be where the design came from.

Issue 44 Necrobot planet statues
Final panel on top, initial designs for the panel below it.
Sakamoto was originally allowed to include characters who weren’t main characters like Arcee and Sixshot.
There were supposed to be flowers around the statues, equal to the number of lives killed by the Scavengers, and it was felt that Arcee and Sixshot had too many flowers, so Sakamoto changed them into statues of characters who probably didn’t have that high of a kill rate.
James Roberts told Sakamoto to put new, original characters in the background, but Sakamoto had trouble coming up with new characters, so he used some characters from a series of original Transformers comics he had been writing in Japan for the last 20 years…

Issue 44 background characters
Top panel is the final version while beneath it are the characters Sakamoto took from his own Japanese comics and put into the background of the panel.
Their names are Cyber, Yamada-3, Action, Indead, and Wheezing Arrow.
Yamada-3 is actually a Lupin III-inspired character.
Blue Bacchus’s design from last year’s panel was also based on a character from Lupin III.
Wheezing Arrow is Sakamoto’s own original Seeker.

Issue 49 smelting pool panel
Sakamoto was supposed to write a lot of original characters here too, but of course he couldn’t really come up with this vast number of characters. James said like nearly a 100 different guys. So, Sakamoto used concept designs and inspirations from the Transformers Generations book to fill all that out.
It took a long time to draw all of this. The TFWiki crew is gonna go nuts documenting all of these guys now. Unfortunately, many obscure Transformers made their "final" appearance in this one panel.
While most of these characters are just designs, there is actually a single character who has his own toy…

Sunshine
Sunshine is a fan character from Sakamoto’s original Transformers fan comics.
His toy is a custom repaint of the Micromaster Drillbuster from Transformers: Zone, repainted with a pink body, a yellow windshield, black treads, white thighs, and a white drill.
However, the colorist for Issue 49 gave Sunshine a more unique color design, which Sakamoto would like thank the colorist for all their hard work.

Japanese Transformers manga – Unite Warriors Offshot and Legends

What was released over here as Transformers: Generations was released in Japan as Transformers: Legends and Transformers: Unite Warriors. Prior to these lines, the Generations line was introduced in Japan through various lines such as Henkei! Henkei! Transformers and Transformers: United, and had their own storyline which was kind of a flashback to the original G1 storylines.

With Unite Warriors and Legends, the idea was to depict what happened after the stories in the original G1 storyline to these characters. Sakamoto loves to connect things to the Japanese G1 storyline. He’s one of the people responsible for the huge Japanese timeline that came out around the Kiss Players era. So, the following are connected at some point to the G1 story in Japan.

Unite Warriors Offshot

In everyday life, another theme was to depict the everyday lives of these Transformers who are fighting every day but also probably have quiet vacations and other kind of everyday lives.

Aerialbots
The theme for the Superion toy was they’re eating their lunch, and this is a panel of them having an Energon barbecue outside. This is actually an idea Sakamoto had for a long time. He wanted to show various energon cube dishes: energon spaghetti, energon cube steak, and various other dishes. There actually is no particular reason the Aerialbots are having a barbecue, but Sakamoto decided to do what he wanted to do for a long time.
In the bottom-left, you can see Prince Jumal from the cartoon grown up. The scene has the Aeiralbots reunite with Jumal after a long while, and they’re having a party.

Stunticons
In the episode where Starscream created the Combaticons, there’s a scene where Megatron calls the Stunticons, but they say they can’t help because they’re too busy crashing cars in the city, so this scene is a homage to that. Takara at first told Sakamoto to depict the Stunticons playing with toy cars, but he chose this over their descriptions. The Stunticons are riding these cars in the manner that Rumble was riding the car that was the basis for Drag Strip in "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1".
The car Dead End is riding is the Symultech car owned by Auggie Cahnay. The man who is chasing after Dead End is Auggie Cahnay’s son.
In the background, you can see Breakdown slipping on his own oil.

Continuity
Many of you might be questioning about exactly when this storyline takes place. And to answer that, Sakamoto would like to introduce the comic that came with Grand Scourge, the e-HOBBY release in Japan. And in that comic is a scene where Superion and Menasor are fighting alongside Legends Megatron and Masterpiece Optimus Prime. And in another Legends comic, you can see Masterpiece Optimus Prime and Legends Megatron fighting. And, apparently, in the Legends storyline, Megatron turns into this form after his Generation 2 form.
One of the themes you’ll see from reading Hayato Sakamoto’s work is that it always fits into continuity somewhere. He doesn’t just throw out something random or offhand. It's MTMTE he thinks about. Does this jibe with everything we’ve had before it, does it fit into continuity with G1 stuff? Of course, it’s very specific. Every mode he has, every character that appears there is thought out deliberately.
So, to answer the original question, the storyline takes place somewhere after Generation 2, and that’s why Jumal looks so old in that other panel.

Protectobots
Sakamoto didn’t have his original artwork for this so a cutout of the art from the toy was used instead.
In the background, you can see NUL-A. In the cartoon, NUL-A was sporting a New York Yankees baseball cap, so Sakamoto thought that NUL-A probably was a baseball fan, and so that’s how Sakamoto came up with this scene with everybody playing baseball. You might realize that the gloves the characters are using are actually the hands for the combined mode.

Constructicons
The Constructicons are rebuilding Crystal City with various characters including an older Chip, Hoist, Grapple, and Omega Supreme. And Sakamoto also added RoadHauler, who was a character who first appeared in the first episode of the original G1 cartoon, and is a color variant of Grapple.
In Japan, it was decided that Hauler was to be the seventh member of the Constructicons, as stated in the backstory of his e-HOBBY toy bio.
Andrew Hall was kinda hoping for them to be able to squeeze Gravedigger in there as well, who was the supposed eighth Constructicon appearing in United EX, but there probably wasn’t enough space to get him in there.
In the original cartoon, the Constructicons had a treacherous rate, they would backstab a lot of characters. So, Sakamoto wanted to show a scene where they had kind of reunited with a lot of characters they had backstabbed over the years. But actually, this is another scene where the Constructicons are tricking these characters.
The Constructicons are actually tricking the Autobots in this scene, as they plan to doublecross them once the city is built.
The name "Grapple" is secretly engraved somewhere in the shadow of one of the pillars in the artwork.

Initial design for the Constructicon art
This is a scene where all the Constructicons are building a candy house. Scrapper is wearing the long tall hat like a chef would wear. The humans in the bottom-left are the construction workers from the cartoon that were always being stolen from by the Constructicons. Takara told Sakamoto that the picture almost looks like the Constructicons are getting ready to eat these humans, and so that was why they didn’t use it. Probably for the better.

Convoy Grand Prime
The surfboard and the idea of surfing is from "The Ultimate Doom".
With Sunstreaker is the RiD (Car Robots) character Kelly (Junko). They were a team in the Binaltech Asterisk line in Japan, so he wanted to kinda pair them together again. Sakamoto feels that the idea of Sunstreaker, who originally dislikes humans, being with Kelly is very interesting, so he used it in here.
On Optimus Prime’s hand is Marissa Faireborn and her daughter Sue. Sue is actually a character originally designed for this scene, and Sakamoto hopes he can use her in other scenes in the future.

Grand Galvatron comic
In this storyline, the story will be that Galvatron’s ghost, after Galvatron died in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon, has possessed Cyclonus, and now he’s scheming his revenge and comeback.
Sakamoto was initially thinking to go with explaining this character to be Galvatron II, a character by e-HOBBY, but decided to go with something a little bit more meaty, and that’s why his coloring is white.

In the future, there will be Bruticus and other characters will be released, and Sakamoto plans to work on such artwork and hopes you all enjoy it.

Legends

Sakamoto’s original series. In Legends, one thing they attempted to explain in the story was why Ultra Magnus has the Matrix in his G2 form when he originally was not able to carry it in G1. There are certain elements to the story that kind of illustrate that as we can see.

Before we start looking at Ultra Magnus, let’s give a quick introduction to the Legends Universe. It is a universe that is created by the Zamojin beings that were tricked by the Quintessons. It is a universe that introduces all aspects of other universes.

Ultra Magnus
In the Legends Universe, Sakamoto was planning to introduce Ultra Magnus as his G1 self, but the toy that was to be released in the Legends toyline came with Alpha Trion. In the American release of the toy, it was Minimus Ambus. But in the Japanese release of the toy, because the IDW comics are not that well known in Japan yet, Takara told Sakamoto to come up with a different character, and so he decided to go with Alpha Trion.

In the episode 3 of The Headmasters, Alpha Trion sacrifices himself to become the contents of the now-empty Matrix. In Japan, the Matrix is thought to be an energy source which draws its energy from a culmination of experience and knowledge by former leaders who carried the Matrix. The idea behind Alpha Trion recharging the Matrix was that Alpha Trion being the oldest Transformer in the original cartoon universe had seen and known all these leaders, and thus had experience and knowledge of all these leaders. And so thus his presence could recharge the Matrix once again. And one thing that shows how the Matrix changed with Alpha Trion recharging it is how Rodimus Prime’s design changed by the new Matrix.

Alpha Trion, now one with the Matrix, had different bodies such as the unreleased Scourge redeco and the Minimus Ambus redeco. So, the once dead Ultra Magnus was revived by placing Alpha Trion, now the Matrix, into his chest chamber, and so became the e-HOBBY original toy Laser Ultra Magnus. The e-HOBBY toy was released maybe ten years ago and there was a story of him being called back to life through the Matrix, but never an explanation for why he has the Matrix, how this is possible, and so through the course of the Legends manga, Sakamoto was able to explain why this occurred.

A word of things to come.
So, like this, in the Transformers: Legends storyline, they are introducing and recreating the story of what happened to various characters after the main storyline. So, in the continuing Headmasters toyline, they will continue with this Legends storytelling, and plan to tell why Chromedome and other characters have new bodies and how Blaster and Blurr have become Headmasters.

G1 Toy concepts

Powermaster Triple Changer Optimus Prime
This was a concept for the original 1988 Powermaster Optimus Prime toy with a triple-changing cab that would have had a truck cab, jet, and robot modes.
It’s one of the designs that was patented for release back in G1, but never made into production. We got the one we got in 1988 instead.

Powermaster Megatron
This was a Sakamoto-original concept as a Doubledealer redeco.
It’s not a real toy concept, just an idea Sakamoto thought up since he figured that it only made sense for there to be a triple-changing Powermaster Megatron to go with a triple-changing Powermaster Optimus.

A little late coming on this but I just found out that Alfes 2010 has a gallery of photos taken of this panel's slideshow - http://higekumatoytoy.blog60.fc2.com/blog-entry-2602.html


Using these pics, I can add some visuals to my panel report (open each image in a new tab to view them at full size):
 

Hayato Sakamoto’s Transformathematics panel

Hayato Sakamoto, Andrew Hall, Ken Rose

More Than Meets the Eye


Issue 50 cover –exclusive cover by Hayato Sakamoto and Casey Coller
 

Sunder
Sakamoto was first told by James Roberts to make a Freddy Krueger type character, so the claws on his hands are probably inspired by Freddy. Sort of like a nightmare villain like Freddy, sort of ghastly like that.
He tried to go with the Freddy Krueger image, but also knew that Sunder was a scientist, so he might be skinny. But, as the story goes on, he would be attacking and hurting a lot of people. So, Sakamoto decided on a little more of a horror image in his piece.
In the Japanese horror movie Yatsukhaka Mura, a serial killer goes around killing people with two flashlights attached to his head. So, Sakamoto thought that the idea of a serial killer looking a little bit weird might actually be even scarier, so that was his inspiration for the character.
When Sakamoto first showed Andrew Hall the draft, Andrew was against it for it looking too goofy, but Sakamoto insisted that he would make it scary.
In MTMTE issue 48, James Roberts has this image of a very scary face, and Sakamoto started his design for Sunder from that face, which led to the idea of inspiration from Yatsuhaka Mura, and with that inspiration, Sakamoto had reservations from James Roberts for Sunder to transform into a lunar vehicle, and so the altmode of the design needed an antenna. Sakamoto initially had trouble putting the antenna into the design because it kinda speaks too much for itself, but took inspiration from the Taiyō no Tō statue in Japan, which inspired him to make the antenna itself a face.
 

Kindle and Fervor
New characters, initial and final designs
In Sakamoto’s designs, Kindle was yellow and Fervor was red, but the colorist made some decisions on their own and made them different, apparently. Sakamoto still likes his designs better (LOL), but he does feel the colorist made the right decision.
A lot of effort was put into these designs, but it was pretty easy to tell from the script that these two would not make it through the next issue. So he tried to make them as memorable as he could in their single panel appearance in issue 48. And they did end up dying with just the single panel.
 

The spy in the DJD, Agent 113
This was another character that only had a single panel in the actual issue, but Sakamoto had some memory that Megatron had said inside of a story that this was a character that can’t hold a gun, so Sakamoto thought about long fingers or lightsaber hands, and also added some attributes that would look like a member of the DJD.
James Roberts instructed that he should have machetes or blades on his hands, which might also be where the design came from.
 

Issue 44 Necrobot planet statues
Final panel on top, initial designs for the panel below it.
Sakamoto was originally allowed to include characters who weren’t main characters like Arcee and Sixshot.
There were supposed to be flowers around the statues, equal to the number of lives killed by the Scavengers, and it was felt that Arcee and Sixshot had too many flowers, so Sakamoto changed them into statues of characters who probably didn’t have that high of a kill rate.
James Roberts told Sakamoto to put new, original characters in the background, but Sakamoto had trouble coming up with new characters, so he used some characters from a series of original Transformers comics he had been writing in Japan for the last 20 years…
 

Issue 44 background characters
Top panel is the final version while beneath it are the characters Sakamoto took from his own Japanese comics and put into the background of the panel.
Their names are Cyber, Yamada-3, Action, Indead, and Wheezing Arrow.
Yamada-3 is actually a Lupin III-inspired character.
Blue Bacchus’s design from last year’s panel was also based on a character from Lupin III.
Wheezing Arrow is Sakamoto’s own original Seeker.
 

Issue 49 smelting pool panel
Sakamoto was supposed to write a lot of original characters here too, but of course he couldn’t really come up with this vast number of characters. James said like nearly a 100 different guys. So, Sakamoto used concept designs and inspirations from the Transformers Generations book to fill all that out.
It took a long time to draw all of this. The TFWiki crew is gonna go nuts documenting all of these guys now. Unfortunately, many obscure Transformers made their "final" appearance in this one panel.
While most of these characters are just designs, there is actually a single character who has his own toy…
 

Sunshine
Sunshine is a fan character from Sakamoto’s original Transformers fan comics.
His toy is a custom repaint of the Micromaster Drillbuster from Transformers: Zone, repainted with a pink body, a yellow windshield, black treads, white thighs, and a white drill.
However, the colorist for Issue 49 gave Sunshine a more unique color design, which Sakamoto would like thank the colorist for all their hard work.
 
Japanese Transformers manga – Unite Warriors Offshot and Legends

What was released over here as Transformers: Generations was released in Japan as Transformers: Legends and Transformers: Unite Warriors. Prior to these lines, the Generations line was introduced in Japan through various lines such as Henkei! Henkei! Transformers and Transformers: United, and had their own storyline which was kind of a flashback to the original G1 storylines.

With Unite Warriors and Legends, the idea was to depict what happened after the stories in the original G1 storyline to these characters. Sakamoto loves to connect things to the Japanese G1 storyline. He’s one of the people responsible for the huge Japanese timeline that came out around the Kiss Players era. So, the following are connected at some point to the G1 story in Japan.

Unite Warriors Offshot

In everyday life, another theme was to depict the everyday lives of these Transformers who are fighting every day but also probably have quiet vacations and other kind of everyday lives.
 

Aerialbots
The theme for the Superion toy was they’re eating their lunch, and this is a panel of them having an Energon barbecue outside. This is actually an idea Sakamoto had for a long time. He wanted to show various energon cube dishes: energon spaghetti, energon cube steak, and various other dishes. There actually is no particular reason the Aerialbots are having a barbecue, but Sakamoto decided to do what he wanted to do for a long time.
In the bottom-left, you can see Prince Jumal from the cartoon grown up. The scene has the Aeiralbots reunite with Jumal after a long while, and they’re having a party.
 

Stunticons
In the episode where Starscream created the Combaticons, there’s a scene where Megatron calls the Stunticons, but they say they can’t help because they’re too busy crashing cars in the city, so this scene is a homage to that. Takara at first told Sakamoto to depict the Stunticons playing with toy cars, but he chose this over their descriptions. The Stunticons are riding these cars in the manner that Rumble was riding the car that was the basis for Drag Strip in "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1".
The car Dead End is riding is the Symultech car owned by Auggie Cahnay. The man who is chasing after Dead End is Auggie Cahnay’s son.
In the background, you can see Breakdown slipping on his own oil.
 

Continuity
Many of you might be questioning about exactly when this storyline takes place. And to answer that, Sakamoto would like to introduce the comic that came with Grand Scourge, the e-HOBBY release in Japan. And in that comic is a scene where Superion and Menasor are fighting alongside Legends Megatron and Masterpiece Optimus Prime. And in another Legends comic, you can see Masterpiece Optimus Prime and Legends Megatron fighting. And, apparently, in the Legends storyline, Megatron turns into this form after his Generation 2 form.
One of the themes you’ll see from reading Hayato Sakamoto’s work is that it always fits into continuity somewhere. He doesn’t just throw out something random or offhand. It's MTMTE he thinks about. Does this jibe with everything we’ve had before it, does it fit into continuity with G1 stuff? Of course, it’s very specific. Every mode he has, every character that appears there is thought out deliberately.
So, to answer the original question, the storyline takes place somewhere after Generation 2, and that’s why Jumal looks so old in that other panel.
 

Protectobots
Sakamoto didn’t have his original artwork for this so a cutout of the art from the toy was used instead.
In the background, you can see NUL-A. In the cartoon, NUL-A was sporting a New York Yankees baseball cap, so Sakamoto thought that NUL-A probably was a baseball fan, and so that’s how Sakamoto came up with this scene with everybody playing baseball. You might realize that the gloves the characters are using are actually the hands for the combined mode.
 

Constructicons
The Constructicons are rebuilding Crystal City with various characters including an older Chip, Hoist, Grapple, and Omega Supreme. And Sakamoto also added RoadHauler, who was a character who first appeared in the first episode of the original G1 cartoon, and is a color variant of Grapple.
In Japan, it was decided that Hauler was to be the seventh member of the Constructicons, as stated in the backstory of his e-HOBBY toy bio.
Andrew Hall was kinda hoping for them to be able to squeeze Gravedigger in there as well, who was the supposed eighth Constructicon appearing in United EX, but there probably wasn’t enough space to get him in there.
In the original cartoon, the Constructicons had a treacherous rate, they would backstab a lot of characters. So, Sakamoto wanted to show a scene where they had kind of reunited with a lot of characters they had backstabbed over the years. But actually, this is another scene where the Constructicons are tricking these characters.
The Constructicons are actually tricking the Autobots in this scene, as they plan to doublecross them once the city is built.
The name "Grapple" is secretly engraved somewhere in the shadow of one of the pillars in the artwork.
 

Initial design for the Constructicon art
This is a scene where all the Constructicons are building a candy house. Scrapper is wearing the long tall hat like a chef would wear. The humans in the bottom-left are the construction workers from the cartoon that were always being stolen from by the Constructicons. Takara told Sakamoto that the picture almost looks like the Constructicons are getting ready to eat these humans, and so that was why they didn’t use it. Probably for the better.
 

Convoy Grand Prime
The surfboard and the idea of surfing is from "The Ultimate Doom".

With Sunstreaker is the RiD (Car Robots) character Kelly (Junko). They were a team in the Binaltech Asterisk line in Japan, so he wanted to kinda pair them together again. Sakamoto feels that the idea of Sunstreaker, who originally dislikes humans, being with Kelly is very interesting, so he used it in here.

On Optimus Prime’s hand is Marissa Faireborn and her daughter Sue. Sue is actually a character originally designed for this scene, and Sakamoto hopes he can use her in other scenes in the future.
 

Grand Galvatron comic
In this storyline, the story will be that Galvatron’s ghost, after Galvatron died in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon, has possessed Cyclonus, and now he’s scheming his revenge and comeback.
Sakamoto was initially thinking to go with explaining this character to be Galvatron II, a character by e-HOBBY, but decided to go with something a little bit more meaty, and that’s why his coloring is white.

In the future, there will be Bruticus and other characters will be released, and Sakamoto plans to work on such artwork and hopes you all enjoy it.

Legends

Sakamoto’s original series. In Legends, one thing they attempted to explain in the story was why Ultra Magnus has the Matrix in his G2 form when he originally was not able to carry it in G1. There are certain elements to the story that kind of illustrate that as we can see.
 

Before we start looking at Ultra Magnus, let’s give a quick introduction to the Legends Universe. It is a universe that is created by the Zamojin beings that were tricked by the Quintessons. It is a universe that introduces all aspects of other universes.
 

Ultra Magnus
In the Legends Universe, Sakamoto was planning to introduce Ultra Magnus as his G1 self, but the toy that was to be released in the Legends toyline came with Alpha Trion. In the American release of the toy, it was Minimus Ambus. But in the Japanese release of the toy, because the IDW comics are not that well known in Japan yet, Takara told Sakamoto to come up with a different character, and so he decided to go with Alpha Trion.
 

In the episode 3 of The Headmasters, Alpha Trion sacrifices himself to become the contents of the now-empty Matrix. In Japan, the Matrix is thought to be an energy source which draws its energy from a culmination of experience and knowledge by former leaders who carried the Matrix. The idea behind Alpha Trion recharging the Matrix was that Alpha Trion being the oldest Transformer in the original cartoon universe had seen and known all these leaders, and thus had experience and knowledge of all these leaders. And so thus his presence could recharge the Matrix once again. And one thing that shows how the Matrix changed with Alpha Trion recharging it is how Rodimus Prime’s design changed by the new Matrix.
 

Alpha Trion, now one with the Matrix, had different bodies such as the unreleased Scourge redeco and the Minimus Ambus redeco. So, the once dead Ultra Magnus was revived by placing Alpha Trion, now the Matrix, into his chest chamber, and so became the e-HOBBY original toy Laser Ultra Magnus. The e-HOBBY toy was released maybe ten years ago and there was a story of him being called back to life through the Matrix, but never an explanation for why he has the Matrix, how this is possible, and so through the course of the Legends manga, Sakamoto was able to explain why this occurred.

A word of things to come.
So, like this, in the Transformers: Legends storyline, they are introducing and recreating the story of what happened to various characters after the main storyline. So, in the continuing Headmasters toyline, they will continue with this Legends storytelling, and plan to tell why Chromedome and other characters have new bodies and how Blaster and Blurr have become Headmasters.

G1 Toy concepts
 

Powermaster Triple Changer Optimus Prime
This was a concept for the original 1988 Powermaster Optimus Prime toy with a triple-changing cab that would have had a truck cab, jet, and robot modes.
It’s one of the designs that was patented for release back in G1, but never made into production. We got the one we got in 1988 instead.
 

Powermaster Megatron
This was a Sakamoto-original concept as a Doubledealer redeco.
It’s not a real toy concept, just an idea Sakamoto thought up since he figured that it only made sense for there to be a triple-changing Powermaster Megatron to go with a triple-changing Powermaster Optimus.